How do I invite a friend to join me on Facebook?

I want to start getting into the habit of inviting people I meet at conferences to join me on Facebook. Is there an easy way to do that?

That’s a superb strategy. Let me say that first off. In fact, my approach to meeting people is a slight variation on that: I use LinkedIn to memorialize the connections I make at conferences, workshops and seminars. My logic is two-fold. First, it helps me remember who I met and gains me some level of access to their network of friends and colleagues, and second, it also demonstrates to them that I walk my talk: that I really do put a lot of effort into social networking. As my Mum would say, the proof’s in the pudding, though I’m not really entirely sure what that means!
Like most of the big social networks now, Facebook makes it pretty darn easy to invite someone to join you or connect to you or link to you (pick your favorite metaphor).
Log in to your Facebook account, then choose Invite Friends from the Friends menu on the top of the page:

At this point, you get to a very simple and straightforward friend invitation entry box:

As you can see, I filled in a personal message to Greg Cohn, a colleague at Yahoo with whom I hope to soon have a connection on Facebook. You don’t have to put in a personal message but I can’t emphasize enough that invitations with personal messages are far more likely to be successful. I think this is even doubly-so after a major conference like Blogworld Expo or similar since they might be inundated with invitations. If they don’t know who you are, they might just axe your invite.
Click “Invite” when you’re ready and you’ll get a quick confirmation:

As you can see – and as is no surprise at all – Greg is already on Facebook. That’s okay, the invitation magically turns into a “let’s connect” rather than a “you should join Facebook to connect” invitation.
That’s all there is to it.
Want to learn more about Facebook? I have lots of Facebook Help here, and you can also find me on Facebook too (and practice sending invitations by sending me a personalized invite if you’d like.
That’s not all! I also have a Facebook Fan Page that I invite you to join too!

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I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by
buying you a cup of coffee!

Being highly cynical about FB, I can see a reason why they’ve made it difficult in the new format to get to the section where you add friends. FB had (may still have) a facility where it can search your email address book and tell you which of your friends are on FB. It didn’t make clear that, by default, it then sent invitations to every one of them to become your friend; and then sent them a reminder email every month. The only way to stop this (too late for the first invite though) was via the old “Invite Friends” menu, from where you could “View all invites” and then delete all of them. That’s now much more difficult to find. As above, you can get to it still via https://www.facebook.com/invite.php.

Allen, you’re right. This feature seems to have been removed from the latest version of Facebook. What I do instead now is use my shortened Facebook URL and just send a regular email instead. Don’t know yours? Just go to http://www.facebook.com/username and it’ll show you what you’ve set or, if you don’t have a custom URL yet, tell you how to set it. Just be careful: you can’t change it once set.

One of us must be using an old version of Facebook. There are no listins at the top of the home page that match the directions in this answer. Drives me nuts when it either doesn’t match the current version (and isn’t deleted whent he version updates) or they start one or two menus into the steps.

I want to invite someone as a friend and the advice that is on your link, is outdated, as the FB page looks totally different now.
How do I invite someone? Why is it so difficult? Is it because I am from the previous generation or what? It is frustrating.
Regards.
Johann de Kock.

Since they changed Facebook, there isn’t a Friends menu and I can’t figure out how to invite friends. Would you be willing to reply to this comment to tell me if you’ve figured out how to invite new people via their email address like we use dto be able to do?

I want to invite a friend that I could see is on facebook but I don’t have their email address. I tried just to invite a friend but it wants me to type a code in. I don’t have a code and can’t see the code to type in

If you know the friends first or last name it will rely help.
Go to invite friends, and search with the required names, and then you will see some list of similar names, then you check and select carefully the contact you want to invite to your page.
ok.